Dicing with the Stars: The 10 Most Ridiculous Celebrity Car Mods

Nothing exceeds like excess, and when it comes to excess, pop stars—be they musicians, actors or athletes—perform some of their most defining career work in the automobile bazaar. As important in the 21st century as it was when Elvis was king, the outlandish auto remains a key, heroic lifestyle accoutrement helping to forge the modern celebrity idol's public image. Here are some of our favorite recent expressions of excess in motion.

Justin Bieber's Batman-themed Cadillac CTS-V

Give the pop sensation credit for not going the Italian exotic route, which would have been easy. Instead, the lapsed (some would say self-hating) Canadian has gone all-American for his fans. We're not entirely sure about the thoroughness of Bieber-ization process, carried out on his behalf by West Coast Customs on a Cadillac CTS-V coupe. Signified by black paint—with de rigeur matte finish—and a logo at the front, then treated to some slightly overlarge dubs, it stops far short of extraordinary. Doors with custom rear hinges for that always-dangerous "suicide" door look are cool enough, but they add nothing to the 556-horsepower muscle car's capability. Fortunately, a bone stock CTS-V is a pretty sick machine in its own right.

Photo: Splash News

Kim Kardashian's Range Rover

Television's most talentless has strongly (small "c") catholic tastes when it comes to luxury automobiles, relying on a typical stable of Ferraris and Rolls and what have you to fulfill her Hollywood dream. There's nothing original about her celeb-utante Range Rover, either. But, for a big thing, it does have a handsome backend.

Photo: Splash News

David Beckham's Jeep Wrangler Unlimited

It often only takes one goal to win. So it is that Los Angeles's favorite Brit soccer player picks up a deciding point of praise here, and just in the nick of time. The man could have anything in the world in his driveway, and does. And, yet, among his basic SoCal fleet of high-end, rich-people standards, he spots himself a Jeep Wrangler. Tarted up and perhaps a little too gangster for authentic off-road use, or for our delicate sensibilities, there's still something classically cool about an old-school Jeep.

Photo: Splash News

Paris Hilton's Lexus LF-A

A limited-run supercar, with exotic carbon-fiber and aluminum construction. Lexus, Toyota's luxury arm, gave the LF-A a ten-cylinder engine that's as close as road-going mortals can get to a Formula One V10. The fruit of nearly a decade of labor, the LF-A is meant to provide the most discriminating connoisseurs with the absolute best that one of the world's great engineering companies can muster. And Paris Friggin' Hilton drives one? Surely, Lexus had someone else in mind.

Photo: Splash News

Justin Bieber's Fisker Karma

A teenaged gift to the automobile industry, the Canadian returns to this list often, this time in a chromed Fisker Karma. A glittery gift from Ellen DeGeneres, the reflective silver finish is the stuff of kindergarteners' dreams, and the underbody LED lights are circa-2002 The Fast and the Furious in the best possible way, even if they're more appropriate for a Jetta of the same vintage. Of course, the Karma probably doesn't really need extra lights to further trouble its electronics—they're trouble-prone enough already, according to early reports—so best of luck, Beebs. The good news is, your car looks cool standing still.

Photo: INFphoto.com

Lapo Elkann's Ferrari 458

Somehow, Lapo Elkann has become an international phenomenon. To the manner-born, he started out wearing the bespoke suits his grandfather (industrialist, head of the Fiat empire Gianni Agnelli) left behind, which were really cool. But Lapo's outfits—and, we fear, his cars —have gotten progressively more ridiculous with the passage of time. Welcome, then, what may be the world's only unappealing Ferrari 458. Its camo paint job—with ironic accompanying peace sign!—misses the mark by just enough to ruin the whole thing.

Photo: Splash News

Victoria Beckham Edition Range Rover Evoque

While her husband gets credibility points for driving a Jeep, Victoria Posh Spice has a down-market Range Rover named after her, which in our view gets points removed from Range Rover. Co-branding with humans is a big risk, as evidenced by Chrysler's infamous Celine Dion debacle, an aborted marketing sojourn with the first lady of French-Canadian easy listening. As then, the association is meant to connote refinement and good taste, but doesn't. For even more than Dion, Beckham is everything the Range Rover brand shouldn't be: frivolous, lowbrow. and over the top. Just like every other two-bit custom luxury car, her signature model has matte paint, blacked-out wheels, and a price tag fit only for the wealthy and deeply medicated. Where is a proper spokesman, like Sir Edmund Hillary, when you really need one?

Photo: Courtesy of Land Rover

J.C. Romero's BMW X6M

A car cannot possibly be more vulgar than a BMW X6, unless it is an X6M. And they can't get more vulgar than that unless they're the pimped X6M belonging to St. Louis Cardinals pitcher J.C. Romero. A polite round of applause for the fact that Romero's ride is repping Cardinals' colors, but the tasteless paint scheme is outshone by the fundamentally tasteless nature of BMW's pseudo-coupe crossover, a prime example of the new genre of crossover sweeping the universe: big, expensive, and powerfully ugly.

Photo: Courtesy of Rennen International

Andrew Bynum's Nissan GT-R

Straight out of the pages of Super Street magazine, the Nissan GT-R belonging to Los Angeles Laker Andrew Bynum sports a $20,000 body kit called the Wald Sports Line Black Bison. If memory serves, that was the burger we ordered at our last ecutive lunch. At least Bynum has some bolt-on performance upgrades to even out the "show" with the "go."

O Canada, he's back! This time in a customized, matte-black Smart ForTwo. Too dumb to be clever? Don't worry, "SwagCar" badging takes the place of the Smart logo. Because, the hardworking reporters at TMZ remind us, the Beeb's new car has got "swag." There is of course the temptation to recriminate, "Good god, Justin, please, why? You don't need to impress or shock anybody. You couldn't have needed the money." Then again, getting this novice driver out from behind the wheels of 556-horsepower Cadillacs and the like strikes us as a capital idea, whatever you call it.

Nothing exceeds like excess, and when it comes to excess, pop stars—be they musicians, actors or athletes—perform some of their most defining career work in the automobile bazaar. As important in the 21st century as it was when Elvis was king, the outlandish auto remains a key, heroic lifestyle accoutrement helping to forge the modern celebrity idol's public image. Here are some of our favorite recent expressions of excess in motion.

Justin Bieber's Batman-themed Cadillac CTS-V

Give the pop sensation credit for not going the Italian exotic route, which would have been easy. Instead, the lapsed (some would say self-hating) Canadian has gone all-American for his fans. We're not entirely sure about the thoroughness of Bieber-ization process, carried out on his behalf by West Coast Customs on a Cadillac CTS-V coupe. Signified by black paint—with de rigeur matte finish—and a logo at the front, then treated to some slightly overlarge dubs, it stops far short of extraordinary. Doors with custom rear hinges for that always-dangerous "suicide" door look are cool enough, but they add nothing to the 556-horsepower muscle car's capability. Fortunately, a bone stock CTS-V is a pretty sick machine in its own right.